November 4, 2017

Would Leonardo da Vinci have streamed his work online?

Television is 20th century technology and the new way to consume entertainment is to watch streamers on services like Twitch. A streamer is someone who is showing him/herself through a web camera while the person is doing something like playing a game, drawing a picture, or even looking for zebras in South Africa. Why? Traditional television has a broader audience, so the television shows tend to become kinda dull. Watching a stream on Twitch is more personal and you can even interact with the person through a chat. Streamers are also calming background noise, and I was listening to an art streamer while writing this article.

But watching someone else doing art is not something new. I've recently read a biography on Leonardo Da Vinci, written by Walter Isaacson - the same author who wrote the official Steve Jobs biography. He has also written a biography on Albert Einstein, and I've read all three of those books. In the book on Leonardo da Vinci, it's revealed that people were watching him when he was doing art, while he was saying "Drawing in company is much better than alone."

When Leonardo da Vinci was painting The Last Supper, spectators would visit and sit quietly just so they could watch him work. The creation of art, like the discussion of science, had become at times a public event. According to the account of a priest, Leonardo would "come here in the early hours of the morning and mount the scaffolding," and then "remain there brush in hand from sunrise to sunset, forgetting to eat and drink, painting continually." On other days, however, nothing would be painted. "He would remain in front of it for one or two hours and contemplate it in solitude, examining and criticizing to himself the figures he had created." Then there were dramatic days that combines his obsessiveness and his penchant for procrastination. As if caught by whim or passion, he would arrive suddenly in the middle of the day, "climb the scaffolding, seize a brush, apply a brush stroke or two to one of the figures, and suddenly depart."

Here are some other lessons learned from the book on Leonardo da Vinci:

You have to observe the real world and this is more important than learning from someone else:

If you look around you, you will not see any sharp lines, so why should you paint using sharp lines? "Paint so that a smokey finish can be seen, rather than contours and profiles that are distinct and crude."

Use shadows, not lines, and this is the secret to modeling 3d objects on a 2d surface. Leonardo da Vinci spent more time studying shadows (and thus light) than he did on any other artistic topic.

Leonardo da Vinci took this one step further by dissecting human bodies to really learn how to make better paintings. Art and science is interwoven. If you paint someone, you should begin with the skeleton, then the skin, and finally add the clothing.

Study the movement of bodies. Many say that Leonardo da Vinci's characters are moving, and he said that "movements should announce the motions of the mind." If he met someone on the street with an appearance he wanted to study closer, he invited the person over for supper.

To remember all observations, he always brought a notebook with him. In these books he wrote what he observed and what he wanted to observe, such as "Describe the tongue of the woodpecker."

He failed a lot. In some cases it could take 20 years before he finished a painting, and in some cases he never finished a painting he was working on. Leonardo da Vinci wanted is art to be flawless, so he could never finish them because they were so complicated if you took the lighting into account. In one case he had to dissect a body to learn how a muscle worked before he was satisfied with the painting.

Combine fantasy with observation. Leonardo da Vinci is famous for coming up with futuristic machines, like helicopters and tanks. But it turned out most of these machines were not meant to function because he created those machines for theatrical plays. If you want to draw a dragon, it's easier to combine parts from other animals, like the head from a dog, the eyes from a cat, the ears from a pig, and so on.

Procrastinate is not always bad. Leonardo da Vinci was having a discussion on how creativity occurs. Sometimes it requires going slowly, pausing, even procrastinating. "Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form."

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